thoughts about marketing sparked by events

06/05/2008

Creatures of habit?

It appears from a new study using mobile phones to track the whereabouts of over 100,000 people that we move in pretty small circles. Most people stay within 10km of their homes and return over and over again to the same locations.

Supermarkets could have told you this. They are pretty good at assessing how far people will travel to shop at their stores. And of course, people tend to return to work and home pretty regularly.

What would be more interesting would be to look at the edges as Seth Godin puts it. How about looking for exceptions and seeing what that tells us about people, their occasional habits and their movements?